Database systems may use discs as permanent data storage. Such systems may be referred to as disc resident database systems (DRDBS). With the decreasing prices and higher densities of semiconductor technology, it may be attractive to store increasingly large databases into memory. Consequently, such main memory database systems (MMDBS) have gained a lot of popularity. It should be noted that DRDBS may not be restricted to the use of discs as the only storage media, neither may MMDBS be restricted to main memory. For example, DRDBS may use main memory for caching data access, whereas MMDBS may make use of disc storage for backup and logging purposes. One difference between both technologies is that in MMDBS, the primary database copy may be kept in memory, whereas in DRDBS, the primary copy may reside on disc. DRDBS may be optimized to handle the typical characteristics of the disc storage stack. MMDBS may achieve a higher transactional throughput and faster response time than the disc resident counterpart, by providing algorithms that may be optimized for high-speed access to memory data.
Due to the high-speed access and direct addressability of semiconductor memory, in MMDBS, data access may no longer be a primary factor determining throughput and response time. With the exception of commit processing, the performance of MMDBS may increasingly depend on computational power. Therefore, it may be desirable to seek a database system which accelerates the execution of database transactions.